noah’s mark

Every so often, I get asked questions along the lines of one of these:

Question type #1:

I need a type that is exactly n bytes/bits long. How do I get this?

Question type #2:

On machine x, the size of some type(usually wchar_t) is wrong! How do I fix it?

I actually just got the second question, hence the reason for this post (although that guy won’t see the answer, because he was a dick). The short answer is this:

(Most) types in C and C++ are either only relatively sized or implementation defined.

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Sometimes I hear people debating the relationship between synchronous and asynchronous execution. Or maybe distributed vs client/server architectures.  The thing to remember, in both of these cases (and a few more), these things are not dichotomous - one is completely subsumed by the other.

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A few weeks ago, Ballmer was giving a talk somewhere and got a bit chewed out from a mother about her daughter (?) who had begged her to switch to Vista, only to switch back shortly thereafter.  He told her something along the lines of, “Your daughter saw a lot of value!”, to which the lady replied, “She’s thirteen.”

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If you haven’t seen it, go out and rent the movie Wag the Dog. My favorite quote from this movie happens right after a few of the characters survive a plane crash. One character finds a small portable TV, on which less-than-agreeable news is playing. In anger, she tosses the TV to the ground, breaking it.

Robert DeNiro: Leave it alone, will ya? What did the TV ever do to you?

Lady: It destroyed the electoral process.

Before you read, go watch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zORv8wwiadQ.

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